Copyright & license information

[Faidon Liambotis]

Hi there,

Thank you for your work! It's nice to see efforts towards a non-binary G.729 codec.

Unfortunately as things stand right now, the code is undistributable in both source and binary forms, as there is no copyright information or license attached. (Note: I'm talking about a copyright license, not a patent license). This means that "all rights are reserved" by its (technically not known) copyright author, which means one does not have the rights to use, copy, modify or distribute this software.

This can be resolved by the copyright author(s) of the code adding Copyright statements, a LICENSE file (e.g. GPLv3, for compatibility with Asterisk ?) and ideally preambles on the source files, including ideally SPDX headers. Should be quick and easy :)

Beyond making this legal for your users to download/use/redistribute, it would allow downstream distributions (such as Debian, Ubuntu etc.) to ship this codec. IPP is not open source (OSI approved) I believe, but bcg729 is, and is included in Debian/Ubuntu, so it would be relatively easy to integrate.

On that note, shipping a tarball without all the IPP headers etc. removed, and perhaps passing it through:

  unifdef -B -DG72X_3=0 -DG72X_9 -DG72X_BCG729=1 -DG72X_CALLWEAVER=0 -DG72X_ASTERISK=180 codec_g72x.c

...would help in downstreams not having to deal with IPP and its licensing at all.

Faidon

[Arkadi Shishlov]

Hi,

I believe the best way would for an interested party to just take the source codec_g72x.c (which is under GPLv3 as indicated in README) and start a new project with Bcg729 only + a trivial CMake manifest.

Fitting current project into a Debian package looks like too much work for a package maintainer / downstream.

Without pre-16 Asterisk and IPP boilerplate it would be a nice small codebase rarely requiring a change.

Or talk to Asterisk people to integrate.

[Faidon Liambotis]

Thank you for the response!

Mentioning GPLv3 almost in passing in the README is better than nothing,
but it can be problematic: is this the GNU GPLv3 as published by the
FSF? Is it the "or later" variant, or the "only version 3" variant?
What happens if the file is copied, but the README isn't?

As the GPL itself mentions[1]: "It is safest to attach them to the start
of each source file to most effectively state the exclusion of warranty;
and each file should have at least the “copyright” line and a pointer to
where the full notice is found".

Would you be open to adding the GPL preamble (see "How to Apply These
Terms to Your New Programs" under [1]) to the file?

1: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html

While at it, it'd be ideal to also add:

// SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2023 <name of authors>
// SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-3.0-or-later

Thanks again!
Faidon

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